It really depends on your personal psychology. After I burnt out in a demanding role that I adopted as a big part of my identity, I joined a new company vowing to not take work as seriously (I remember telling myself, "if excess effort isn't rewarded, the optimal strategy is to maximize compensation, minimize necessary effort, and eliminate excess effort").
After a few months of recovery and ruminating on why I still felt so bad (plus therapy), I learned a few things about myself:
1. I feel like garbage when I'm half-assing something at work or not giving my all -- especially when the people around me are putting in the work.
2. When I am giving my all and I feel like I'm not being recognized, I begin to lose motivation and burn out. Simple tasks become very laborious. This is a gradual, months-long process that is difficult to recognize is happening.
3. When I start to burn out, I am forced by my mind and body to half-ass things, which makes me more demotivated, which exacerbates the burnout.
Putting these insights into action, I've so far been able to keep burnout at bay by finding roles where I can give work my all, receive recognition, and be surrounded by others who are putting in similar effort. This doesn't mean blindly trusting the company or destroying my work-life balance -- I believe that "recognition for hard work" includes proactively protecting hard workers from their workaholic tendencies and giving them the flexibility to take breaks. I'm lucky to work with really great people where I frequently pass along responsibilities or take work from others to avoid over-stressing any one person and enable things like multi-week vacations. I have no idea how I will change my approach if I lose this workplace dynamic or pick up more forcing functions on my workday (e.g. having kids) in the future, but it's working pretty well for me right now.
All of this is to say: for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of. People are wired differently, so I want to caution against a one-size-fits-all approach.
We mostly design and build data/devops/mlops/cyber platforms for big banks and other finserv companies - lots of Databricks, AWS, and GCP services.
[1] https://bit.ly/4j5cC5T (I'll expire the link in a few days for privacy reasons)
But, these positions are easily done by a highly skilled American workforce: Cloud Engineers, Lead Cloud Engineers, Cybersecurity Engineers. That’s what is being advertised.
"In 1930 Austrian-American economist Gottfried Haberler detached the doctrine of comparative advantage from Ricardo's labor theory of value and provided a modern opportunity cost formulation. Haberler's reformulation of comparative advantage revolutionized the theory of international trade and laid the conceptual groundwork of modern trade theories."
Can it only exist in medium and small companies?
Could you elaborate some more, please?
Given that those places are also doing stuff like writing their own network stack to reduce latency, I get the impression that they know their shit.
> are those places not filled with the most horrible vultures on the planet?
However, given their pay and other contractual limitations, it can be very attractive and fiercely competitive to land a job unless you are really good. Hence the the fake “vultures” rumor to gate keep.
P.S. Worked at one briefly and figured that I will become unemployable in regular market soon if I ever plan to leave… and not work in this industry anymore.
Slack, by Tom DeMarco https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...
> for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of
What you just described (so vividly) is meaning, and (likely) "flow" too. Meaning must be there for everyone, in their efforts; the need for meaning is universal. (We can call it intrinsic motivation too.)
Some say that you can find meaning outside of work, and then can mostly ignore work; and it's also said (correctly I guess) that "psychological richness" (closely related to resilience) is important: drawing meaning & satisfaction from multiple sources.
Sure, but I have a practical problem with that: if you need to work 8 hrs/day to cover your family's needs, you don't have time, energy, or opportunity left to find meaning elsewhere.
And, as others have repeatedly said it here, if you are a full time employee making quite beyond your (family's) needs, and think about decreasing your working time (giving up excess money, but regaining much needed time & freedom), that is what is strictly forbidden by the runners of the Village of Happy People. You will find effectively no jobs that let you work (say) 5 hours per day, for 62.5% of your original salary. That way, you'd just not be a good slave, a good cog in the machine. Society is engineered such that you must not have free time.
Therefore the only practical option is to find (or create) work that provides meaning for you intrinsically. I see no other option. You can be an employee or run your own business, the same applies. And, unfortunately, this is unattainable for most of society.
The second part of your post is something I've thought about a lot. There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
- Less communication overhead due to fewer people
- Constant availability (less need to pre-plan meetings, etc to match everyone's hours)
- Less complexity WRT HR, payroll, taxes
- Fewer SaaS seats to pay for
Some of these are more solvable than others, and allowing more people to work part-time in tech is definitely swimming upstream, but I do wish more businesses would try.
Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) is one person leaning into this approach with great success: https://sahillavingia.com/work
Health insurance coverage is not tied to an employer. Being able to pay for health insurance premiums with pre tax income is tied to an employer.
The benefit to the (large) employer is that it makes it harder for their employees to compare competing employment offers, and adds a little more friction to an employee who might be considering switching jobs.
The administrative costs of implementing benefits so that pre tax money can be used to pay for them also serve as a barrier to entry for smaller employers (helping large employers), since these costs cannot be amortized over a large number of employees.
But beside all that,
> There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
It’s just cheaper, in all ways, to have fewer employees. Less people to trust, less people an employer is liable for, less hiring/terminating costs. The cost of burnout is clearly not a significant factor considering the lack of success of businesses full of part time employees.
Part time help is cheap.
I could see maybe the argument against this because of paid accounts in remote systems: google suite, office 365, bamboo, github, etc. compared to reduced use, but they set those up anyway for other people in the company who don't use them (non-devs, etc) and I don't believe the cost per user is significant.
Do you mean tax costs? AFAIK typically country requirements for benefits are proportional to time worked, so part timers don't get all the benefits. Which benefits are you talking about specifically?
Not in the US anyway. It’s exceedingly common in the Netherlands to work 32 or even 24 hours a week.
In line with Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which explores (among other things) why some Holocaust survivors thrived and some didn’t. Frankl himself was a survivor.
"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story."
Some people need to have their "story", otherwise they end up miserable, regretting their wasted lives.
As human attention is finite. Or is it suggesting that the ‘story’ can somehow qualitatively improve, without limit, while actually occupying less physical time?
Your story is something intrinsic; you can decide how you want to share it with others.
The thing is, there are at least four major factors that lead to the energy depletion of burnout:
- physical (i'm unhealthy, don't sleep, eat or exercise well)
- mental (i'm distracted and interrupted constantly or don't let my brain rest)
- emotional (i work in a culture of terror with people who trigger me)
- meaning - (i simply don't care about what i'm doing and neither do my colleagues)
all of these are necessary, and none are sufficient. most orgs and people are breaking along more than one of these dimensions, and the co-morbidity makes it hard to diagnose the cause of burnout.
Finding the unicorn job isn't the right thing to predicate your happiness on. One thing I like the idea of and am just starting to try is reminding myself why I'm doing the job. What are my bigger goals that it is contributing towards? I know we all know this at some level, but I think it can help to remind ourselves there is a purpose/meaning to why we do our jobs, even if we don't intrinsically get meaning from them.
I can't remember where I read this idea... but somewhere recently.
I am here to periodically remind HN that no, not all programmers here are millionaires who only work not to get bored.
Oh well.
I wish money management was taught in schools. My family didn't have money so how were they supposed to teach me about compound interests. And those growing up in money may not realize its value...
Pain inside does make one do stupid crap. Definitely applies to me. Now I am trying to heal and be more rational with money at least. The rest will follow more or less automatically; removing stress is itself healing.
I hope this helps explain more what I meant by what I was saying. I'm not saying "become terrible at your job and produce poor quality". I am saying, "deliver good enough quality within your means". If your boss says "your current code is good enough for the demo", ship the damn thing as is, don't go rushing to add more features and retesting everything until 4AM.
If a deadline really is too short, say it is too short early on. Keep working, but don't put on a cape and deliver because someone said they wanted something they can't have without causing you to lose sleep for two weeks. People die from stuff like that, it is not worth it.
I would say get out as fast as possible.
I dislike my projects failing and missing deadlines. So in addition to pushing back against unrealistic expectations, I caught other people's dropped balls and filled the gaps of un-backfilled roles. On top of that when there was down times, instead of resting, I took on fun side projects that had higher impact for my employer than the work actually assigned to me.
They got me with praise and guilt tripping, until last year, all the little "do this one more thing", "can you ship it 1 day earlier" had turned into me delivering by myself as much work as the rest of my team on ~20h weeks (because the other 20h I was unable to function due to burnout). We're siloed into different projects so I never realized I was doing 5x the work rather than 20% extra until a new reporting tool visible to each other was used...
So this year, I'm not doing side projects, fixing other people's messes or doing other people's work. I've told my manager and he's bringing an extra person to the team. I'll do my work and I'll do it well but I'm a contractor paid half what my FTE counterparts are, and it's not like there is a path to promotion so I'm not going to compromise my health anymore to do the work of 4 extra people for free. Not in any future job.
Point is, check your workload and if you're doing more than what you're paid for: that's where you can take back the time to find meaning in different things. It's not slacking if you're delivering a day's worth of work in a day, no matter how much HR BS tries to guilt trip you into thinking that.
The compromise I've arrived at is that I give it my all during a very strict time box. I work remotely, so at 9am I start work, I take an hour for lunch, and I check out at 5. With no commute that leaves just over half my workweek waking hours for my family.
During working hours I do it all—I perform my job very well and am lucky enough to be in a place where it's recognized in very measurable ways (promotions, autonomy, and recognition). But I don't give my employer extra time.
The only thing that actually seems to net me results these days is indeed extremely strict, zero excuses unless the nukes are flying, time-boxing.
Reassuring to see that it works for somebody else as well. Thank you.
> What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of.
I have this in bursts during the off-season and that's where I feel like I'm most productive and useful. But the off-season is getting shorter and shorter and I'm compelled to find something else.
Did you find that job through a friend or by interviewing ? if so did you find ways to filter low drive teams ? I sometime mention I seek high speed but I don't think I can trust HR on this.
But I sorely miss not being 100% dedicated. What I do for work has always been a big part of my identity. And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.
Been there many times, but I found that it’s best to aim for good enough, given the resources and constraints, than 100% all the time. I’m a recovering perfectionist, so it’s not always easy to reach that balance, but I try it anyways. When I do not, my anxiety kicks in, and I’m forced to slow down.. I use to be able to ignore it (the anxiety) and keep pushing, but not anymore..
When I worked in Paris, I started at 10 am (to avoid rush hour on the subway), but rarely left before 7 or 8 (instead of 6) and it wasn't uncommon for me to stay until 11pm. I was "cadre" which means you need to deliver on tasks but get no overtime pay with the idea that workload is realistic but flexible: finish early and you're done, run late it's on you to deal with it. Needless to say the balance often tilted one way and not in my favor.
One reason was the culture at that company was to take many coffee breaks, long lunches, go for drinks after work and return to the office after etc. That means the days were pleasant and relaxed most of the time, but you made up for it by spending more time at work. I actually enjoyed it at the time, but I don't think I'd do now.
This was quite typical in my experience. Other companies would pay for overtime but only if you worked after 9pm (because 6 to 9 is for dinner). They'd cater pizzas during that time and folks would end their day at 9, and do just the 3h unpaid overtime while eating pizza in front of their pc.
Just saying, Europe has some great labor laws, but it's not all roses and rainbows either. Employers may still try to exploit you as much as they can within those laws (and sometimes by breaking it, I think lawsuits against employers (aux prudhommes) are a lot more common and employees win them quite often.)
EDIT: These are things to do together if you have no agency at a company to change it. If you need help getting agency, work with your manager to get data to back up your arguments.
Not working for a jerk manager / at a company with bad culture helps, but is not sufficient. I've burned out in a "nice culture" company faster than a "cutthroat culture" company because the nice guys didn't allow much agency.
It's hard to do any one of those, let alone more or all, when you're approaching burnout.
> - stay out of product meetings
I started to avoid product meetings. Still burned out.
> - not actually care how cool and interesting and useful the product can or will be
I started to not care how cool or interesting or useful the product can or will be. Still burned out.
> - Only give feedback to your inner circle (manager, peers) when asked about it
I started to only give feedback to my inner circle. That was even more painful, and still burned out.
> - enjoy the tasks assigned to you however dull or basic they may be after you mastered them
I could never enjoy tasks assigned to me when they're dull and basic things I've mastered.
> - Be proud of your work.
As for being proud of my work... well I'm always proud of my work. I still burned out. I don't want to even touch the things I'm proud of.
Everyone's story of burnout is uniquely different. There's no single magic bullet that works for everyone.
> I could never enjoy tasks assigned to me when they're dull and basic things I've mastered.
If you do need more interesting work and can’t shift teams then find a new job. You will eventually find yourself needing to do the same again after you’ve mastered the new challenge. Keep it up and you will run out of leaps. However if you want to exist in a place for a while you need to accept that not every project, task, idea will be exciting work. Once you accept this, it also opens up doorways with what else you can do with your time. Since you have a mastered skill set, these menial tasks should not be weighing you down to free yourself from the drudgery of work.
> As for being proud of my work... well I'm always proud of my work. I still burned out. I don't want to even touch the things I'm proud of.
You should always be critical of past mistakes and look to correct but you should always put your best effort forward. That is what pride in work means. You shouldn’t have to admire every piece of work you deliver as a masterpiece, which is what I assume you mean by wanting to touch it. You should always carry a positive mindset about your work and not treat each success and failure in your life as some sort of definitive legacy. Invite in and operate under best intentions.
A lot of my advice is about how it works in harmony, not some quick instant burnout solution. Resting is important as well (breaks, vacations).
Anecdotally I was recently hired at a company that is in dire straights. This weighed on me heavily for the first six months, eventually they shrunk my team. However I cannot afford to get burned out. So the only options are to extract as much of the burden from me by being a cog in a bullshit factory or find a new job in a psychotic job market.
This is good advice, work is not a one size fits all solution for self actualization. Most workers just want to fill their requirements and do something meaningful to them with the rest of their time.
I especially like your point about enjoying the fruits of mastery of a task.
They replied to the one that told them their magic advice didn’t actually help them (and they still burned out) with some variety of “That had nothing to do with my advice, you just did it wrong.”
That’s… not cool.
Someone who is not willing to listen or reconsider will easily be susceptible to burn out again. Especially to advice only intended to help not criticize.
I was just thinking the other day that all of the code I've written for companies is now dead and gone. I wrote some really elegant, interesting stuff at a few companies and now it's only a memory in my head.
I should've gone into civil engineering.
Worth remembering we write code to create human value. Somewhere, in some way, your elegant code actually ran and did a thing that led some number of humans to be enabled or understand or somehow be affected by it.
My GitHub has a few pieces of code that I'm really proud of. And some companies actually ask for code I'm proud of as part of the interview process, so I have that ready and it helps.
My graveyard of projects and dreams stretches out behind me and I feel saddened to know that these articles representing portions of my life never achieved what I had hoped for them.
However, I've come to view my work like a mandala or some representation of our mortality itself; our works and our lives are temporary.
We can make the most of the brief moment that we have – whether that be through work or through parenting or through base jumping – whatever that may be for each of us, or we can choose to do nothing with that moment, knowing that it's ephemeral and will be gone soon anyway.
I choose to try making each day's the best code I have ever written; I want it to be "beautiful" and maintainable in spite of knowing that it will be refactored, deleted or decommissioned at some point.
My goal was to get whatever I was working on not just "done", but "done-done". To a state where, if I walked away, it could live on in a working manner and be easily maintained by someone else. That meant having good test coverage, up-to-date documentation, instructions on how to get started with the repo, notes on dependencies, etc. Sometimes that someone else is future me, six months or six years later.
I experienced burnout early in my career, in the dot-com era, and it became especially acute when then the bubble burst. All those long hours (mostly) for naught.
The best times were at companies where everyone was all-in and we each had each-others back. Rare, but amazing when it happens. These were all at startups.
Work for non tech companies if you want it to last. Some industrial code is even older - my company has just removed some devices that requires a floppy disk to update
Ohhh, this is freakin hard to me. Bunch of users are complaining about feature not working properly in our Enterprise product, but it's not impactful enough to fix, because those users are not going to complain to their CEO/COO about broken feature in our product, because they themselves might be labeled as COMPLAINER and eventually kicked out.
What's impactful? Of course new shiny AI-powered green button, it's so amazing, project created by a super talented story teller engineer and who is good at selling it to leadership. Does it impact metrics? Yes, of course, those metrics are also crafted specifically for that feature. (more time user spends on that page, more impactful. Is it? maybe users are confused or can't find what they're looking for? Can you tell it to leadership? Ohh they approved this metric and project, are you against VP+ leadership's decisions?)
And we wonder, why do we have double digit customer churn rate.
What is the employee churn rate?
Not caring doesn’t mean checking-out it means being satisfied with your paycheck and not needing more than the limitations if your job.
I'm here, but it just seems like a temporary fix. I can't imagine doing this for the rest of my life, but I need money and health insurance. What's the alternative, what did you end up doing?
So many people followed a path laid out by others for so long—-study hard, do extracurriculars, go to a good college, study hard again, do internships, get a job with a prestigious company, work towards promo.
At some point, generally in late 20s but can be before or after, many such people realize that they have if not everything they ever dreamed of then at least a lot of what they worked towards. But they still aren’t happy because in all those years they never figured out what kind of people they actually were—what it is that would make them happy.
We all need money, but do you need that much money? If yes, then ok. Try to think about what you need the money for in the next stupid meeting about story points. But if no, then you have options.
People change a lot. There's no golden idol person in my future that would make me happy if only I could break free and become that person. That person changes constantly.
I think we are unhappy because we've been fed a lie that that person is just over the horizon and you're not living your full life properly unless you become that person. The problem is that that person changes constantly. It's always out of reach and who's to say you will be happy once you get to that point?
A change in mindset is the cure. But a change in mindset does not cause economies to scale, shareholders to get value and cause the wheels of industry to move. We are always arriving for something we think will save us.
Because you just can't think "what would make me happy" without involving people who aren't even around in the present moment. In fact, if somehow someone manages to come up with a way to satisfy happiness by ignoring their environment then that person deserves my sympathy, because the goal is not to be "happy no matter what goes around you": That requires detachment.
My assumption is people like us, we care a lot, we are smart, we are capable, and when we get stuck in corporate swamps our inner candle starts to go out. We just need to find ways to spend less time in the swamp.
Everything is temporary, even you. You only need enough money for you to live from your 401k/rented houses/investments.
Also, be on the lookout for new opportunities.
And if you are a bit masochistic just try to work on something boring. Helps with "not caring enough, I'm just the computer equivalent of a payroll accountant, pay me and you'll get your payrolls on time".
Glad to see some good old Buddhism philosophy at work. I am much happy now once I start thinking the same
There are lots of causal factors leading to burnout. It’s basically a long term energy imbalance along multiple dimensions.
One of those dimensions is attentional fatigue caused by our messy digital environment:
https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back
But there are other factors that feed into it: physical, emotional, social.
I highly recommend attention span by Gloria Mark, The Power of Engagement by Jim Loehr, and for those who want to change their life, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.
I think in practice it is much more complicated than that. While org charts largely a tree, the influence graph is often very different. It isn't like the immediate manager can just fire anyone they feel like without consequences in most orgs.
Unfortunately this situation isn't able to be earnestly evaluated in the US without enormous effort to reform labor law. (Or if it is earnestly evaluated it obviously biases the needs of the employer rather than the entity that matters.)
From a Marxist perspective I think we're seeing the synthesis of deeply individualistic capitalist culture, and the renewed awareness of class consciousness and workers rights. In the past these kind of conflicts have led to the 5 day work week, The New Deal, etc. But the same conditiona can also lead to far-right authoritarianism.
A side effect of higher education becoming "low status" is that men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history. Which makes them more vulnerable to radicalization.
> men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history
And to be clear this includes prestigious nationally-ranked “tech” schools, right? Possibly even those with lip service to a liberal arts education where one can actually be excused from “distribution requirement” courses based on their high school experience. (Oh, you support that? Well… maybe I did too, but I sure didn’t understand the connections. Maybe a class would have helped.)
I think if you see a majority-female CS class graduating from Stanford it is a sign that VCs and other power brokers will begin weighting that credential less.
This is complementary to the anti-intellectualism that's already baked into fascism. Rich people like Peter Thiel have already started paying people to "not go to school" as an anti-intellectual backlash against inclusion and diversity.
Much like women no longer qualified as gamers for playing the same games that men grew up with (point n click, puzzle games...) because men flocked to newer genres since (actions/shooter) Bit of a dated caricature but fitting imho.
If men wanted to keep women out, it is easily managed, case in point programming was seen as secretarial work until men decided it made good money and they should appropriate it.
(Fully expecting to be downvoted for saying this)
And regarding your Idaho farmers and other nutters with horns on the head, they are too irrelevant and dumb to cause anything serious even in large numbers.
Social media and its propagandists are the source of modern radicalization, together with failure of neoliberalism to produce growth that benefits the little guy. The university far leftist radical and rural Trump voter have lots in common in hating the status quo. They just blame different things, often the wrong ones like migrants or white privilege.
Everyone not in the billionaire club should hate neoliberalism.
Jobs, gender, salary level for a given job, gender roles, and whether child care is considered "work" are all social constructs.
I think anyone who has turned on the news in the last 9 years, what technologies and companies are trending, can predict which way things are going to go. Again though, we all need to come together for that too...
Yes. The US lost the general pattern of an 8 hour day, a 40 hour week, time and a half for overtime, and employment duration measured in decades. Most people can handle that.
Most people cannot handle 996 work, "clopeners"[1], and "side hustles" for long.
That's really it. The US just needs to get back to what were normal labor practices from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The key item here is paid overtime at a higher rate. That makes it uneconomic to have people at work too long. It's cheaper to hire an additional person.
"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will." - Knights of Labor, 1888.
[1] https://calchamberalert.com/2023/04/14/clopening-schedules-g...
There's another failure mode of modernity, that makes this quote a sleight of hand: commute. Commute takes another hour or three out of the "rest" and "what you will" sets.
There were mechanical washing machines and vaccum cleaners back then, even before electricity, but even that was all harder work than now.
Modern economy is set on the premise that there's always some way to make money, meaning there's always more work that could be done (regardless of whether that work is actually useful).
A lot of big cities have youth programs out of fear kids will otherwise join gangs. As an adult if you have a big mortgage payment or rent is high you must hustle. Some of this rat race is optional. Advertisers tell us making yet another purchase will solve your problem(s) or insecurity. Ironically if everyone lived modestly that would trigger a recession.
This is going to be interesting.
[1] https://www.employmentlawhandbook.com.au/bulletin/new-laws-c...
Let's have a look at China, or the former communist countries (soviet union etc). All people in those communist regimes are slaved, being under surveillance and often suppressed (except the regime, of course), with the government being the suppressor (as opposed to greedy companies). History is full of evidence, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway
Thinking capitalism is the culprit is naive. Power will find its way. Legal regulations of working hours, holidays, health insurance as well as unions work very well for most modern western countries. In many countries there's a constant fight between unions and companies. That is a good way to balance power. No need to bring back cruel communist regimes.
We used to run companies and share stock. Now private equity hands out money and goals and if the goals aren't met your company that is doing great and turning 15% per year evaporates on the next recap.
Once you realize that that person is an idiot or is against you it kills you psychologically because you realize you are in a dead end.
Personally, idiots are fine as long as they listen to their team-mates when it matters. Maybe that means they aren't idiots... Anyway, adversarial bosses and extremely poorly managed projects are the issue for me. That is a dead-end with possible health issues and career [Vio]ing sprinkled on-top. There's no helping it either. Digging harder just keeps the murderer's [Psy]hes cleaner. That's the trap I see a lot of people fall into.
It's not even about that.
People need to realize that inflicting suffering on those "under" someone is one of the main motivators of human behavior.
It's innate and it exists because the abuser get tremendous benefits, including health-wise.
Often-times its just garden variety psychopathy, narcissism, and other dark personality traits. For those people its definitely innate. Unfortunately psychopaths pathologically do everything they can to position themselves into seats like management/leadership. It's kind of a tricky situation for other-wise mentally well people.
This resonates with me. The org chart cares about headcount - it doesn't matter to them who fills the count. Only plausible heads who could pass some random interview. The upper bosses don't see you as human, only as chess pieces to move around to fit a narrative.
If the narrative against you shifts to the negative, there are many ways to justify your exit. They don't care if you die, or your children go hungry, or you lose your house or healthcare. What they care about is narratives that justify their own existence in the org chart. They don't even care about the services or products they build. It is just about their own existence. Every other effort be damned.
Reader, now that you are aware that they don't care about anything - and certainly not about you - it is really up to you to secure yourself financially, physically, emotionally and preserve your time. If they come at you with reviews or other BS, you should consider your time is up, safeguard yourself, and sabotage them if you can.
This is fair. Remember that you are playing with the same rules as them. If they can't care about engineering, you sure as hell don't need to. If they care about politics, you sure as hell play it with them.
Take it as a toxic game but secure your life - as far away from corporate toxicity as possible.
Let me advise against sabotage. There's a saying about seeking revenge and digging two graves. The truth is, this whole thing is unsustainable, and will collapse on it's own. No one actually has to do anything to sabotage something like this.
I recommend instead to "document" and "socialize". The people who operate this way are sloppy, greedy, and think they are invincible. Don't do anything to convince them they are though. They are always, and I mean always, fucking up. Spread the good word of your documented and likely illegal treatment to a pro-bono employment lawyer before or after a likely illegal lay-off and get a severance as a settlement avoiding court entirely (if you wish).
Socialize with others you trust in your industry about the treatment at the companies that operate this way. Be weary of slander, that's what documentations helps with. Word travels fast. In the old days this was how people dealt with societal outcasts. With the internet, this is easier than ever.
That said, I can't control what someone decides to do but I will share. One of the "worst" things you can do at a company like this is be really nice to people inside and outside your team, and do your job within your means. It drives the creatures up a wall. Sometimes after you leave even if not by your own volition, others will follow suite by their own accord.
I just can't see it ever changing.
But, as people love to say, everyone eventually gets to their own level of incompetence. This is definitely mine. I want to be able to segment my not caring and I am trying various things; nothing so far works but some measures have netted very small results -- like being dead-tired and suffering from 3 separate heavy health conditions, for example. If that can be counted as "a measure that works", that is. :D
I’m not sure how replicable it is in a different org though, and I’m not likely to leave to find out xD
how to balance that with the fact that you wanted more than just waking up for a paycheck by working in this field ? being passive and bored (reminds me that bore-out exists too) is not how i envision a happy life
"Identify a mature business, ideally one that is critical for customers. Buy it at a decent price. Cut it to the bone by reducing the workforce, eliminating less lucrative products and slashing research-and-development budgets. Jack up prices for captive clients. Harvest the cash. Fork lots of it out to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, which big tech tends to shun. Take what is left and repeat."
Why try hard if I will end up in the same ditch not trying hard?....
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2024/12/19/meet-the-most-...
The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
In many places if you get hurt/burnt out on the job the upper seats are looking for any reason to curb stomp you. There's no reason to give a company your all unless you have an actual stake in it or they are there to hold you up when you're dragging. I've worked at multiple places where influential people died, yes dead, below average life expectancy, - on the job - and corporate did everything they could to not even pay out on their legal obligations (life insurance, D&D). In some cases employees joked or snickered about the person who died later on - in meetings.
In tech. I've found that you're not on your own but you are at the mercy of who is in charge of your schedule and rates your performance. If you lose trust in that person your best option is to leave as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will do what they can to destroy you for as much 'profit' as they can claim. Being clear. It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...", etc.
Check in with yourself regularly. Know the signs of burn out. The company you work for does not depend on any person caring about you in the slightest.